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Laptop Hard Drives Failing Left and Right

O

OSUTex2004

Junior Member
Hello,
I am a systems administrator. Lately I have had 4 laptop hard drive fail in the last 6 months. 3 of the 4 hard drive were brand new Sony Laptops running Hitachi hard drives. Has anyone else out there experienced a large volume of hard drives failing in laptops lately? Does anybody know what is causing this? My only thought to the cause is the power management. I noticed by default laptop hard drives will go on standby in less than 15 minutes. I think the constant spinning down and spinning up is partially responisble for the failures. What does everybody else think?

Thanks,
Mike
 
Ok, so four different notebooks, three of which were Sony notebooks with Hitachi hard drives and one other which involved (I presume) neither a Sony notebook nor an Hitachi hard drive. It's obvious that, with a small sample of machines, statistical aberration could be the culprit. Is this four notebooks out of five thousand, or is it four notebooks out of a population of four? It's also possible that Hitachi turned out a bad batch of drives, or that Sony turned out a bad batch of notebooks -- and that the fourth failure is just a coincidence. But you still can examine the variables to see if there might be an actual common cause for the failures.

1. Same user for all four notebooks, or different user?

2. Same working environment (temperature, vibration, quality of power supplied at the outlet, etc.) for all four notebooks, or different working environment? Think of every place they're being used that might differentiate them from other notebooks (if any) that aren't failing. Airline adapters? Car adapters?

I had a nervous user once who had one notebook hard drive failure after another. The failures stopped when I gave her a different brand / model of notebook. One day I rode to lunch with her. I noticed that she had a gazillion nervous tics, including a tendency to pound on the stick shift in time to the music playing on her stereo. She hit the shifter so hard she knocked it out of gear once -- and her foot wasn't anywhere near the clutch! On a hunch I went to her workstation to watch her work that afternoon. She was whacking her thumb HARD against the front of the notebook's casing in time to music, right where the previous notebook models' hard drive bay had been! My guess is that she was damaging the drives by whacking them (and flexing the connectors inside the casing) while the system was in operation.

I suppose something similar could be happening in your situation, but it's probably more likely to be an environmental factor independent of the end user. Or just plain bad luck.

- Collin
 
I wouldn't blame the power management. Laptop HDDs are meant to stop spinning to preserve the laptop battery. Do these laptops run hot, that will kill your HDDs. Personally, I don't care for Hitachi, and even Fujistu, HDDs with Hitachi being the worst of the two in my opinion. I had a Hitachi drive, it was noisy, slow, and ran hotter than my Toshiba or IBM drives. Make sure if your users are carrying the laptop around when it is on, that they are a little more gentle. Laptop drives are made to take shock, but everything has it's limits.
 
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